This week, Jim Shepard's short story collection was nominated for a National Book Award. And rightfully so.

It's easy to ignore the short story. Everybody does it. Short stories, man, who needs them? Short stories are for school kids and sad girls.

We are men. We don't want books at all but if we did, we'd want them writ large. We'd want apocalyptic fantasies from weathered cats in chambray. Or better still, fuck the fictions. Give us five simple ways to make more scratch. Give us fourteen principles of hyper-effective leadership. Give us big histories from old preppies -- WWII. Abe Lincoln. The Greeks and shit.

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I'm not immune to this kind of thinking. I ignore short stories all the time. Then I read a couple and, mostly, I don't like them. It's not that they're short. It's that they are small. Small in their ambitions. Claustrophobic in their worldview. They're too coy and too quiet, and their easy wisdom reminds me of my least favorite things -- rain in November, middle age, NPR. But then, just when I think I'm quits with stories for good, I read a collection that knocks me dumb. Or rather, one that reminds me just how dumb I am.

Like most short story collections, Jim Shepard's latest is easy to ignore. This is not the kind of book that's likely to get referenced at dinner parties. And nobody will be particularly impressed by its heft should they spot it on your nightstand. Its title too is something of an embarrassment, the kind that calls to mind school kids and/or sad girls -- Like You'd Understand Anyway. For all these reasons, most guys will probably ignore Shepard's book. That's entirely understandable, and also a terrible shame. Because in a little over two hundred pages, Jim Shepard tells us just about everything we need to know.

Shepard delivers this news via the first person, in eleven stories that include not a single clunker. (In fact, I'm not sure there's a single lousy sentence in this mighty book.) His narrators are a varied lot -- a cosmonaut in love, Aeschylus at war, a kid packed off to summer camp. But what they share in common is a proximity to disaster and an uneasy sense that the distance between "what we want, and what we do" is as wide as it is deep. Everybody hurts. Everybody knows this. But Shepard knows it better. He also knows how to write his way around the mawkish side of this hurting. Stories that in lesser hands could easily go soft and sentimental are rendered here with clear eyes and true grit. In "Trample the Weak, Hurdle the Dead," one of the best stories ever written about football, Shepard locates the terror at the center of every huddle. He does this with the same precision and correctness of tone with which he offers up the guys who blew it at Chernobyl, or the Nazis who went hunting for sasquatches. Empathy is one thing. Diction is all.

Taken together, these stories render a world, where people make huge mistakes with or without realizing it and, either way, pay for them dearly. Expeditions begin with lofty talk and die slowly in the sand. Teenagers flip over tables. No one gives a shit. Nobody volunteers to clean another's mess. This is a world where the dead are both "lost and always with us," and where even the executioner must consider what's for dinner. Taken together, Shepard gives us our world in this little book. We'd be fools to ignore the offer.